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Fiverr, an online services marketplace that gives its community of skilled sellers a platform to market and sell whatever it is they can do from as little as $5, is relaunching its website with an overhauled design. It’s also adding analytics and tools to help its users turn their Fiverr ‘gigs’, as it calls them, into more sustained and streamlined businesses.

The new look also appears aimed at giving Fiverr a similarly modern look and feel to rivals like TaskRabbit — which has recently been focusing on acquiring business users — and Zaarly. Updating a three-year-old design is par for the course, especially in such a competitive space. The new Fiverr will be rolled out “over the coming weeks”, with preview of the new features and the ability to request early access available to users via http://fiverr.com/v2/start.

Fiverr launched back in 2010, raising $5 million in series A funding in 2011 and $15 million from Accel Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners last year. CEO Micha Kaufman tells TechCrunch the redesign is about giving Fiverr users more tools to monetise their hobbies.

“Today, more than 50% of the transactions done on Fiverr are well above $5, enabling members to achieve financial independence on their own terms. We have seen sellers buy homes, cars, paying back student loans with money made on Fiverr. For those — and those who aspire to become the next big sellers — we’ve built tools necessary to manage and sustain a business based on one’s skills,” he says. “Sellers and buyers need a richer user experience and more transparency and insights in data to improve their sales/transactions.”

New tools that are being added to the new look Fiverr include:

A New Marketplace
Buyers now have a beautiful rich marketplace, faster and greater transparency of decisive information, such as seller rating, average delivery time, responsiveness of sellers and more. This is an entirely new experience for both sellers and buyers that’s based on personalization and refined control.

Mission Control
Fiverr now offers a tailored Mission Control dashboard to keep track of business performance including delivery status, order tracking, expenses, and revenues. Mission Control features real-time analytics for sellers including monthly trends, order cancellation rates, buyer demographics, sales, and level-tracking to estimate when it’s time for a promotion.Buyer/Seller Analytics
Sellers can access real-time trend data, order rates, and buyer demographics. Buyers can monitor accounts with access to orders placed, recent searches, and site updates.Single-page Workflow
Buyers and sellers now have prioritized action items, updated in real-time, in a single to do page workflow. This new workflow makes buying and selling information actionable from a single screen. For large sellers and buyers, this is especially critical.

The new Fiverr is also evidently a cosmetic upgrade from the rather dated list-style view of Fiverr’s prior look homepage to a richer view focused on larger thumbnails. This looks as much aimed at encouraging more buyers to use the platform as improving the sales performance of sellers.

Here’s the old homepage design — and see gallery below for the new look and some of the new tools:

The Old

The New

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Kaufman said Fiverr now has more than 1.5 million active sellers and buyers, and is adding “thousands” more per day. Its strongest markets currently are the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and the rest of the E.U.

The company is not yet profitable but he says it sees the freelancing sector (which it calls the “gig economy”) as “a multi-billion dollar market opportunity”. Of course, it’s not the only startup to think so — so realising that potential depends on Fiverr acquiring enough users to scale beyond its locally-focused rivals.

“The gig economy is a multi-billion dollar market opportunity. It has brought forward a number of great companies, but we believe it will also produce the next eBay or Amazon for this space,” says Kaufman. “We aim to be that next giant and we do that be taking a very broad, cross-category approach on a global scale. We serve customers from 200 countries in 120 categories from the individuals to the businesses. We are one of the only freelancing marketplaces that are truly global, but still well balanced with a seller base of more than 55% coming from U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia.”

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Crunchbase

OverviewBrowse. Buy. Done. Fiverr® gives you instant access to millions of Gigs from people who love what they do. It’s the easiest way for individuals and businesses to get everything done, at unbeatable value.
Fiverr is the world’s largest marketplace for creative and professional services, currently listing over 3 million Gigs in more than 100 different categories across 196 countries.
Fiverr …